Apostrophe’s Adventures in PuG’ing: Ep#8

Well folks… It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written one of my Pug Blogs, and that is mainly because I haven’t really been pug’ing that much. My imperial guild has been more active than it’s ever been, and has been growing in size as of late, and as a result we’ve been predominantly running full guild teams for everything from our [WEEKLY] Classic Operations, to farming Hard Mode Scum and Villainy and progression in Hard Mode Dread Fortress/Palace. So my gametime hasn’t left a whole lot of room for pug’ing, which has left me with a lack of good stories.

Until this week…

Operation: Terror From Beyond (8-man Story Mode, Group Finder queue)

Character: Back’slash (Level 55 Assassin Tank)

I got online to play a bit of SWTOR on Wednesday night this week. My guild wasn’t raiding, so I figured it would be a good opportunity to head to Oricon and do my dailies, and stock up on some more reputation trophies to make sure I can cap my reputation next week. (Woot! I will hit Champion on Tuesday with the reset, and then it’s just on to LEGEND!)

I entered the group finder queue for Story Mode Operations while I was doing my dailies, which turned out to be a VERY bad decision.

Pretty much as soon as I had finished the Heroic 2+ on Oricon (not that hard to solo if you are smart about it), and lo and behold, the group finder queue popped! It was for an in-progress Terror From Beyond, and they were only locked on the first two bosses, which meant I was coming in as a tank replacement at Operator IX. (Hooray for not missing out on the weekly!)

I clicked the “READY” button in the queue window, and used my Fleet Pass and then Quick Travel to get to the Ziost Shadow and enter the operation. As soon as I got there, and entered the TeamSpeak channel of the guild hosting the run, I realized that there were at least 3 people in the group that had never run Terror From Beyond before, because the other tank in the group was explaining the Operator fight to several people via chat, because they either couldn’t/wouldn’t enter the TeamSpeak. (That is always a bad sign.)

Partway through the explanation, one of the healers DC’d. We waited about 10 minutes for him, but he never came back so we ended up vote-kicking him and re-entered the Group Finder for a replacement. At that point I asked in my guild if anyone wanted to heal it, and one of my guildies agreed and he queue’d as our replacement and was matched up with us. He (like me) used his Fleet Pass + Quick Travel to get to the operations hanger and entered Asation rather quickly. HOWEVER… while doing that, one of the DPS disconnected…. Then another one said he couldn’t stay on anymore because it had gotten too late, and he asked us to vote-kick him.

So now, we were down 2 DPS, had already been sitting here waiting for a solid 15 minutes, and had to find more replacements.

I ended up exiting the area and heading back to fleet to post in General Chat that we were looking for 2 DPS at the weekly, which usually isn’t difficult. We fairly quickly got 2 people to queue up, and I re-entered the instance. HOWEVER, one of the replacement DPS, for some reason, didn’t Fleet Pass, nor quick travel… He took his ship to the fleet, used interfleet transport, and took at LEAST 10 minutes to get inside the instance. At which point, another DPS disconnected. Back into the queue we went for another replacement. Took about 5 minutes, and we finally did get one.

After we saw his character stay on Imperial Fleet, and NOT enter the instance for a good 10 minutes, we finally asked him: Are you actually going to enter the instance?

His response floored me……

Sorry… Can you just vote-kick me please? I can’t remember how to get there.

Back into the queue we went looking for another DPS…. AGAIN… for what feels like the 100th time. A replacement queue’d up fairly quickly, and it appeared to be a decently geared Marauder who entered the instance with little delay. The ops leader gave some very brief instructions on how to proceed, asked if everyone knew what to do, and we engaged in the fight.

The first phase appeared to be going relatively well, until I noted that the Marauder we had just picked up, was attacking the adds in the middle of the room, instead of attacking the cores. I typed into the ops chat for him to go attack cores and leave the adds alone… twice… and he finally did, and somehow we managed to clear the “blue” phase without failing. Then the “orange” phase began… I ran into the middle of the room, and waited for the dps to channel, and for some reason, he simply didn’t. He was even one of the people on the TeamSpeak channel, and everyone was yelling for him to channel. Finally he did, but it was already too late, and we failed the phase. I picked up the Rectifier and held him in the middle while telling the DPS to channel again…. which he didn’t. (Apologized in TeamSpeak and said he had a “brainfart”…) This led to us failing orange a SECOND time, and I had another Rectifier to hold. The team finally cleared the orange phase, which started up “purple.” And once again, the Marauder who was attacking only adds in the blue phase, it was his turn to channel, and he simply DID NOT. No matter how many times we told him to channel, he didn’t. One of the healers even went to the control panel he was supposed to channel at and PULLED HIM TO IT, and he still didn’t channel.

We failed purple, got overwhelmed by adds, and wiped.

At this point, the Marauder in question….. disconnected. I also learned from the rest of the team, that they had been in this operation, for OVER 3 HOURS!!!! That is pure insanity. Three hours is enough time to full clear BOTH Terror from Beyond AND Scum and Villainy, and they’d been in TfB for over 3 hours and had only cleared 2 bosses? OH MY GOD.

It was at that point, that I graciously thanked the team for their efforts, but that a SOLID HOUR in a story mode operation, resulting in ONE PULL on a boss, that was an utter failure, wasn’t my idea of a good time, and that I was calling it for the night.

I logged out, and went to bed. Thoroughly reminded of how bad pug’ing can be sometimes.

4 comments

Dang, what a nightmare. I was in a guild group last night, and we wanted to do both the TFB weekly and the S&V weekly. We only had 12 people, but decided to knock out TFB without resorting to picking up any PUGers. It worked out fine, but when 2 had to leave we were down to 10 for S&V, and thought it would be best to invite PUGers to help out a little, with the only other option being to drop 2 more people and go with 8. We only ended up finding 3 people after a good 15 minutes of general chat spam. One left before we started because he/she couldn’t find the entrance and couldn’t be bothered to ask for help, one stood by the tents without saying a word for the entirety of the first fight before we kicked him/her out of the group, and the 3rd person was in a mix of Black Hole, blue 66s, and a couple of purple 66s. But he followed directions well, was pleasant, and we were glad to have his heals along the way. He ended up getting about 4 upgrades and we got the weekly done with only one wipe. Can’t always judge a person by their gear, that’s for sure.

Lesson learned – it would be really difficult to enjoy end game PVE content in this game without being in an active guild. The PUG situation is difficult, takes a lot of time, and the quality is just not there. I hope some day they find a way to do something similar to WoW with cross server LFR. For as much flack as people like to dish out to LFR in the WoW community, the alternatives are not usually pleasant.

Progression content aside… I’ve seen all of the raids dozens of times. The mechanics and situations never change, but the team-makeup can. And in a guild group, we all know each other and how we play and what our tendencies are…… Do the same old content in a PuG? And you’re not only playing against the content, but you are playing against each other, and it’s an added level of difficulty/challenge, which in my opinion CAN be fun.. except for when it’s not.

Just reading this story gives me a migraine. I usually start out by laughing as I read these blog posts, but by half way through I start cringing and eventually am in pain. I have enough stress in my real life without puging a 55 op. Kudos to you for doing it. It certainly is a challenge!